Forecasting monthly runoff in a glacierized catchment: A comparison of extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and deep learning models

Accurate monthly runoff forecasting is vital for water management, flood control, hydropower, and irrigation. In glacierized catchments affected by climate change, runoff is influenced by complex hydrological processes, making precise forecasting even more challenging. To address this, the study focuses on the Lotschental catchment in Switzerland, conducting a comprehensive comparison between deep learning and ensemble-based models. Given the significant autocorrelation in runoff time series data, which may hinder the evaluation of prediction models, a novel statistical method is employed to assess the effectiveness of forecasting models in detecting turning points in the runoff data. The performance of Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was compared with long short-term memory (LSTM) and random forest (RF) models for one-month-ahead runoff forecasting. The study used 20 years of runoff data (2002–2021), with 70% (2002–2015) dedicated for training and calibration, and the remaining data (2016–2021) for testing. The findings for the testing phase results show that the XGBoost model achieves the best accuracy, with R² of 0.904, RMSE of 1.554 m³/sec, an NSE of 0.797, and Willmott index (d) of 0.972, outperforming both the LSTM and RF models. The study also found that the XGBoost model estimated turning points more accurately, obtaining forecasting improvements of up to 22% to 34% compared to LSTM and RF models. Overall, the study’s findings are essential for global water resource management, providing insights that can inform sustainable practices to support societies impacted by climate change.